


every road (you know is mine)

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2017 [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Community: wishlist_fic, F/M, Finding Oneself, Gift Fic, Hinted Depression, How Do I Tag, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Nightmares, Not Beta Read, PTSD, Post-Trauma, Prompt Fic, Some Canon Level Violence, Stiles Leaves Beacon Hills, Trauma, introspective, meandering prose, roadtripping, soul searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 02:35:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12878361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Stiles leaves. It's not even hard.(Peter follows. Somehow.)





	every road (you know is mine)

**Author's Note:**

> For Feelingsdusk, who prompted pretty much what the summary said. I'm afraid I focused more on the first part of the prompt than the second, but that's how the story decided to go and I was powerless against it and I kind of like it. It's weird and floaty, but I think it gets across the emotion I wanted to convey and I hope you like it. Feel free to yell at me if you don't.
> 
> (Title from Tamer's Beautiful Crime, which makes an awesome backdrop to this story, along with Aurora's Murder Song (Acoustic).)

+

Stiles leaves. 

It’s not even hard.

He just packs his crap into his jeep, kisses his dad on the cheek and blows out of Beacon Hills with the radio blaring and never comes back. 

He’s supposed to head for college in Arizona, where there’s only desert and heat and no deep dark woods for wolves to howl in and trees to fucking murder him, but he never registered once he got his admission letter. He just told everyone he did and there was no-one who cared enough to smell the lie. 

If anyone asked him why, he couldn’t even tell them. It’s no one thing, no final breaking of trust, no falling out. It’s just the same old thing. It’s his dad grieving and drinking and working and never getting anywhere, it’s Scott ditching him the moment something more interesting comes along. It’s Lydia keeping one eye on the horizon even as she smiles at him. It’s the pack hearing him but not listening to what he says, it’s trying to save them all and getting ostracized for it. 

It’s… well. Maybe there is one thing. It’s Derek come blowing through after Peter manages to escape Eichen House. As the only living relative on record, he gets notified and he takes a week out of his eternal road trip to drop by and warn Scott. He looks good without the weight of the world on his shoulders, all fuzzy beard and less muscles, a little softer around the eyes, a little less haunted. And he looks at Stiles with those new, gold eyes and says, “Jesus, Stiles. This place is killing you.”

Coming from the guy who lost everything in this fucking town, that means something. 

So maybe that’s his moment. It’s not a bad thing, but Derek looks at him with honestly worried eyes and, yeah. Maybe that’s when that vague idea of _getting away_ takes root. 

Maybe that’s why he tells everyone he’s headed to Phoenix without ever doing anything to make it happen. Maybe that’s why he drives straight through to San Francisco where he trades his phone in and cuts up all his credit cards.

He transferred his college fund into a new account, one his dad doesn’t know about, a long time ago, when their madcap adventures started crossing borders. He keeps that card. He doesn’t plan to use it. 

His ID goes out the window somewhere in Texas and his driver’s license follows. Braeden does good work and his new ones will stand up to most scrutiny. 

He meets up with her and Derek in San Antonio and Derek actually hugs him. Fucking hugs him. And Stiles, once the brief moment of panic passes, hugs him back. He half expects himself to start crying, but there’s nothing there. He feels empty.

“I told them I was going to college in Phoenix,” he says. 

“Even your dad?” Braeden asks, tilting her head in a way that makes her scars stand out more starkly than usual. She’s gorgeous in the setting sun.

“Yeah,” he says, because of these two, one gave up her entire life to chase a ghost and the other has made a life of running away since he was sixteen years old and his family burned to ashes in the rearview mirror. They get it. And it makes them unexpectedly kind.

(Stiles has never known what to do with kindness.)

Derek slings an arm around his shoulders, nods. Asks, “Do you want us to keep you up to date?”

Stiles shakes his head. “You do that, we all know I’ll go running back at the first sign of trouble.”

Derek nods again, shrugs, looks at Braeden. She shrugs right back. 

They treat him to dinner before they split up again, them going north, him going east. 

+

He stays in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere for almost two months after finding a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window of the diner he’s having lunch in. Would stay longer, but the waitress he replaces comes back begging for her job after her one true love dumped her in Vegas.

It becomes a pattern, a month here, three there. He gets familiar with backrooms and diners, with small shops and pay-by-the-week motels. He lives off gas station jerky and diner pie, learns laundromats and goodwill stores by heart. 

He doesn’t look at maps. He doesn’t go online. Free days are spent in public libraries, reading books with fraying covers instead of Californian news. 

He dreams of foxes and trees, of cold water and dark forests. Sometimes, when he wakes, there is lightning crackling along his fingers. Sometimes, when he wakes, the neighbors are punching the walls and hollering for him to shut the fuck up. Sometimes, when he wakes, he cries.

More and more often, nothing happens at all. 

(Keep going.)

He turns nineteen in an apple orchard in a flyover state and almost misses the date completely. He tells one of the guys he works with and he spreads it around and somehow, the evening ends with a dozen of them scattered across the grass at the edge of the tree line, cheap whiskey and store-bought cake for everyone. 

He turns twenty much the same way, in a diner a thousand miles further north, south, east, west. He doesn’t look at state names any more than he looks at maps. Derek texts him a happy birthday and Stiles realizes that he’s been gone almost eighteen months. 

Eighteen months on the road. He’s a vagabond now, a day laborer. Hobo with a car. 

The realization is enough to make him stop and wonder. Makes him question for the first time in a long time. Is he happy? Not exactly. But he’s not unhappy, either. Calm.

For the first time in so, so long, he’s calm. He’s by the ocean a lot, spends his lunches sitting on the diner’s deck, watching the waves. His foot will tap, his fingers will dance along the table’s edge, but that’ll be all. He just sits there and watches. 

The lightning comes when he calls, now, and Deaton’s voice droning on about belief and a spark overlaps with the void in his heart whispering, “You didn’t think you’d really get rid of me, did you?”

He doesn’t answer during the day, but sometimes, at night, when he passes a mirror on his way to bed, the _other_ croons, “I died wearing your face, Stiles. Everything I was belongs to you now.”

“I don’t want it,” he tells it. 

“Liar,” it laughs.

“I don’t need it,” he corrects. 

It shrugs his shoulders. “But you have it.”

Not really, though. It’s a weak thing, this thing inside of him, an echo of the hunger, the greed, the chaos and hate the nogitsune was made of. Darkness. Void. This is merely shadow. He can use it, he can leave it. 

He can sleep, five, six nights in a row, without waking from nightmares. 

He doesn’t know if that’s healing or simply forgetting, doesn’t know if he’s finding something or just losing himself. He has no plan anymore, no contingencies, no weapon in his pocket, just in case, no money and escape route squirreled away. 

He lives day to day, unarmed and unharmed, just a face passing through. It’s nerve-wrecking and amazing at the same time.

He inhales sea air and exhales ozone. 

+

Everyone once in a while, he runs into something other than human. Someone flashing goldbluered eyes. A girl with a voice that vibrates just so, making the glasses around her sing. 

An old man moving in the shadow of some great beast. He stops, that man, and studies Stiles from across the road for a long moment before folding his hands over his stomach and bowing, once, low and precise. 

A little boy with a hint of scales behind his ears and a woman with fire on her breath. 

He talks to none of them, smiles at all of them, moves on. 

Eventually, they stop bringing up memories.

(Keep going.)

+

When he’s twenty-one he finds a town that seems… more colorful than most. The people smile at each other in the street and children walk home from school alone, unafraid. 

He finds a job at a florist’s, of all things, spends his days smelling of rosemary and lilacs. Bette, the old woman who runs it, refers him to a friend of hers, who owns an apartment building across town. 

He moves in and for the first time in almost four years, signs an actual contract. Six months, with an option to add on. 

His neighbors drop by one by one. Kelly and Brooke give him a cactus, Alex and his son Danny offer to show him around town. Mr. Harris, the grouchy old man below him tells him to just be quiet. Stiles laughs at the memory of another man by that man and doesn’t think of him strung up like so much meat. 

He does little tricks for Danny, invites Kelly and Brooke and Brooke’s boyfriend, Han, over for dinner. 

He stays. 

Three months and then six and then Kelly and Brooke have a key to his apartment and Bette lets him run the store alone for days at a time because her knees are getting worse and it’s been a year. 

+

In September, he gets a text from Derek. The first, apart from his yearly happy birthdays. It’s simple, just says, _Uncle Peter showed back up. Asking for you. Didn’t tell him anything._

(Somehow, after everything, Derek still can’t seem to drop the honorific when speaking of Peter.)

Stiles stares at it for a long time, then shrugs, wondering only vaguely what Peter has been doing with himself these past few years. If he found some measure of peace. 

Not enough to ask, though.

+

December is around the corner when the girls crowd onto his second-hand sofa and ask, “Are you going home for Christmas?”

“Nowhere to go,” he says, and there’s no guilt and no fear and no longing. He kicks Kel’s feet off his coffee table and goes to make them coffee. 

He sent his dad a Christmas card last year, and the year before. A hello, I’m alive, type thing. He didn’t put on a return address, but made no effort to disguise where he mailed the card from. 

No-one came. 

He wonders, occasionally, if they’re angry with him, or if they’ve forgotten him. If they’re glad they’re rid of him. 

It doesn’t matter anymore. 

Somewhere in California is a town that has his blood soaked into the ground and his death inside a magical tree, his innocence spread across a school and a forest, his hopes dashed against the ruins of a burnt-out house and too many tombstones. 

He’s not there anymore. The only dreams he has these days are about flowers and Danny’s new obsession with frogs and sometimes, when he lets it, of a fox running through an endless, sun-drenched field. 

“That sucks,” Brooke commiserates. “Wanna come with us to my parents’ place? Kel agreed to run interference between Han and my dad. You can help.”

She twists one of her dark curls around one finger, gives him a dimpled grin and doesn’t remind him of Allison. Stiles frowns at them over the top of the coffee maker. “I thought you were going to what’s-his-face’s for Christmas?”

Kelly shrugs, a bit unhappy. Doesn’t meet his gaze. “Cole. And no, we broke up. He was… weird.”

“Ah,” Stiles drawls. “Weird. Right. I get it. Totally.”

She snorts, kicks at Brooke for laughing. “Shut up. He was just… way too intense. We dated for, like, three months and he was acting like we were married. He didn’t want me to see you anymore because he thought I was sleeping with you.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and juts his hip, “Baby girl,” he croons, voice an octave too high, “You just ain’t my type.”

They laugh. He doesn’t think a about Cole the asshole boyfriend again. 

He’s unlearned how to fear every stranger in his sights, how to plan for the worst case and not dare hope for better. He’s unlearned to be terrified. 

+

Brooke’s parents are kind and funny and they only interrogate Han for a few minutes before they start stuffing all four of the ‘kids’ with food and food and food. They ask about Han’s post-college plans, how Kelly’s new job is working out, what Brooke plans to do for New Year’s. They ask where Stiles is from and he tells them California and everywhere else, really. 

“You travelled a lot?”

He shrugs into his potatoes. “I took off after high school and just kept going until I landed here.”

There’s a moment of awkward silence at the table as they compare that to his age and come up with years and years of vagrant living. Road trip that never ends.

(Stiles has basically become Derek. He finds that more amusing than he probably should.)

He watches them watch him for a moment and then starts to babble, world’s biggest ball of twine and Grand Canyon and New Orleans and New York and every tacky tourist attraction he could find in between. 

“Well,” Brooke’s father drawls over dessert. “I guess some people just take more soul searching than three months backpacking across Europe can give you, huh?”

Stiles snorts. “Yeah. Kind of. I like it here, though. Got my apartment and all. Who knows, I might end up staying.”

Or maybe the wind will blow him out of town by spring. Maybe he’ll dream of lightning and wake screaming or maybe, somehow, homesickness will finally set in. 

(Lie.)

The thought of going home still gives him chills. It might for the rest of his life. 

(Keep going.)

Kelly leans into his side, a little tipsy from too much wine, announces, “If you think we’re letting you go, you’re nuts! You’re stuck with us now!”

Brooke and Han nod along. The parental unit smiles fondly. 

+

They walk back home, laden down with leftovers, joking, jostling each other. They’re all tipsy, didn’t want to drive, and it’s a mild night. The air smells clean and Stiles regales them with a story about a winter sent in Montana and how utterly unprepared he was for the frozen hell up there when something changes. 

“Listen,” the fox murmurs and a shiver runs down his spine. 

A shadow unfolds himself from the dark beneath a broken street light and the girls notice too, more fine-tuned to strangers in the night, drag Han backwards even as he shifts to shield them. Stiles’ fingertips itch. He cocks his head, feels old fear fill him up again, the old ba-thump, ba-thump of fighting for your life and knowing you might not make it anyway. 

The shadow becomes a man, tall, broad-shouldered, wearing too few layers for December. He smiles and Kelly recoils. 

“Cole,” she breathes. “What… what are you doing here?”

“I’m sure,” Stiles’ mouth says without his input, slipping into old masks and old habits like he never dropped them to begin with, “that’s he’s only out for a walk, right? Right? Such a nice night for it, stars are out, super pretty, okay, okay? We’re leaving. Ta!” He tugs Kel sideways onto the road, the other side, away, because his heart is thumping out of his chest and the fox is crouching and the moon is shining and he knows this scene. 

Four years and he remembers every second of it. 

“I don’t think so,” Cole snaps, voice too deep to come from an entirely human voicebox. 

Han takes hold of Brooke’s hand, fumbles the bag full of Tupperware, drops it. He doesn’t try to pick it up, just keeps moving. Clever boy. Or maybe he just picks up on the strain in Stiles’ voice. Brooke tugs on his arm, tries to stop. 

Stiles hisses and that might be wrong, too, that sound, because Kelly flinches away from is.

“Kelly is mine,” Cole the ex-boyfriend snarls and there it is, there they are, eyes like embers in the dark. 

Alpha red. 

“Fuck,” Stiles breathes as Han gives up gentle persuasion, drags Brooke backwards so hard she nearly falls, cursing.

Kelly trembles, stuck to the sidewalk like a deer in headlights. Frozen. “What… what’s wrong with your eyes.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Stiles drops his bag, too, peels his second-hand mittens off his fingers and takes a deep breath. He knew how to talk monsters into knots, once upon a time. But that was a long time ago and very far away. He has the masks, he has the habits (buried deep), but he’s not the boy who runs with wolves anymore, no red in his closet, no blood on his shoes. He’s a fucking florist now.

“She’s not yours,” he says, carefully, too quietly to be heard twenty feet away, at least by a human. But Cole hears. Cole is close enough to rip out all their throats and the others are wrong if they think the width of a single street is going to protect them. 

“She’s human, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t feel it the way you do, can’t. You can’t just claim someone. Come on, you gotta know this works, you gotta know humans work differently.”

Those red eyes move from Kelly to Stiles with a snap and a growl. Cole slips one foot backwards, bracing. Crouching. “You. What do you know? Human. She’s mine. She belongs to me, my scent, my pack, mine! Her heartbeat is in my head, and that means she belongs to me!”

“Stiles?” Kelly breathes, “What’s going on?” 

Stiles feels the blood drain from his face. “Did you… did you fucking anchor on her? On your girlfriend of two months? Are you insane? Where the fuck’s your pack? Do you even have one?”

The next snarl is more of a roar. 

Rogue alpha without an anchor. Fantastic.

“Fucking hell,” Stiles breathes and that’s too much, the wolf launches himself across the road, straight for Stiles, fangs bared, claws out, snarling, spittle flying. Someone screams and it’s not Stiles, because Stiles is shoving Kelly as hard as he can, ducking, rolling, those old habits again, and when Cole goes flying right over his head, he kicks out a foot and lets loose. 

The roar of fury turns into one of pain as lightning lances into the were’s stomach and Stiles comes up on his knees, somehow, feels the crackle in his fingers and his own eyes – 

The mirror at home tells him they are silvery blue, almost beta colored, but so, so much brighter. Light in the darkness, void echo, fox fire. 

Han has the presence of mind to grab the girls, shove them together and cover them. Not that it’ll help. He’s adorable, Han is, but he can’t stand up to a slavering beast of a mad alpha. 

“Where’s fire when you need it?” Stiles mutters, absently.

“Now that, sweetheart,” a new voice drawls, entirely too amused for the situation, “is just cruel.”

Some things, some things just never die and this is one of them, this is Stiles’ life in danger and a wolf at his back and sarcasm in his mouth, so he drawls right back, “Sorry, Peter, I promise not to burn you to death again, blah, blah, blah.”

He rolls to his feet just as Cole recovers, crouches again, lunges. 

This time there is Peter, broad-shouldered, thick-necked, fire-mad Peter and he appears between Stiles and the other wolf like magic, his face a rictus mask of animal glee and his eyes as blue as a summer sky. 

He grabs the alpha by the shoulder, twists out of his path and brings him down. Hard. Broken-bones-and-shattered-concrete hard. 

Then, one knee in Cole’s back, he looks up at Stiles, studies him. “My, don’t you look marvelous. Freedom suits you, sweet boy.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Can you flirt with me later, creeperwolf?” He twitches his fingers. Lightning arches. 

Peter looks at it, spellbound. “Oh my,” he offers before Cole rears up and, broken bones or not, he’s still an alpha and Peter isn’t anymore. 

He flings the other werewolf off his back, rolls into Stiles’ legs and topples him. Stiles gets his hands on the deformed face, sends the fox’ power and his own belief through them, making the other _scream_ and, more importantly, keeping him from his jugular. 

One of the girls calls his name, panicking. 

And then Peter’s there, dragging Cole’s head back with one hand, claws ripping out his throat with the other and Stiles is showered with warm, sticky blood even as Peter throws his head back and roars loud enough to make the very air around him sing. 

He throws Cole’s body aside before it stops pumping blood, leaves it to land at Han’s feet, and then he twists, his entire body curling into itself and expanding at the same time and Stiles saw the aftermath of this, once, sixteen and staring at Scott’s healed side, so he knows what’s coming. 

This time, Peter’s alpha shift is more wolf than man, still black, but not deformed, only too big. Eyes too red. He hunches down over Stiles, licks at the blood on his face, makes a sound almost like a purr, low in his throat. 

Stiles bats at his snout, curses, gives in with a hysterical laugh and flops onto the cold ground. “I hate you so much right now. Damnit Peter!”

He giggles, strained, drained, aching all over and stuck somewhere between old muscle memory, old instincts, and the present, where there are no monsters in the dark and no nightmares under his bed except that there are, again, now, and Peter, Peter, he should be surprised, shocked, angry, because Peter, but he just – 

He’s known. Since Derek texted him, he’s known the other man was coming and he could have run but he stayed. Waited. 

Stiles hasn’t waited for anything in over four years. 

(Keep going.)  
It takes Peter only a minute to regain control over his oldnew power, to shift back. Naked, this time, he crouches over Stiles and there is blood on his chin and hands. He grins like nothing happened, like they’re continuing a conversation, perfectly normal. And once upon a time, it was. “Come now. Almost five years since I saw you and this is all you have to say?”

He offers Stiles a hand up. 

And Stiles, gods help him, Stiles takes it. 

Kelly is shivering in shock, Brooke is clutching Han like a lifeline and Han is staring. “What… what the fuck is he? What was Cole? Did you just kill him? What are _you_?”

Stiles points at Cole’s body. Kelly whimpers. 

“Dead werewolf.” Peter. “Living werewolf.” At himself. Well. He shrugs. “Echo, void. Fox. Something left over when something else died.”

Peter chuckles, drapes himself over Stiles’ back, entirely unconcerned at being naked. He buries his face in Stiles’ neck and Stiles has no idea why he lets him except that he has been waiting. For this. Somehow. Since that text. Since Derek’s warning. Since. There has been something inside every shadow for weeks now and maybe that was Cole, waiting, but maybe it wasn’t and Stiles turned his head away from it, time and again and _let it stay_. Waited.

(The fox howls with laughter.)

Longer than that, even. Since he first ran, since Peter escaped from Eichen House, since he went in. Peter always comes back. And he always comes for Stiles. That has been true since the day they met. 

“You smell of ozone now, stronger than you did before. You stopped fighting it.”

Stiles shrugs under his werewolf cape. “I stopped fighting, period.”

He looks at the body, at the blood, carefully doesn’t run his tongue over the stickiness of his lips. Two years of fighting for his life. Four years of hiding and he slips back into the way he used to be, bat in hand, like he never stopped. 

(Not just masks, not just habits, and the lie slides away like so many others, leaving him naked underneath.)

“What are you even doing here?” he demands, takes care not to look at his friends, at their horrified, terrified expressions. Tries to work up some appropriate emotion. Fails. When Stiles is actually Stiles, he is a cold thing, really. Without Scott around to make him, he never quite cares enough.

“I wasn’t going to stay in Beacon Hills without my favorite human, was I? Besides, I’ve died there twice. I’m not going to let that cursed town have my third death. Now, I just became an alpha again and I need a shower. Where do you live?”

Stiles snorts. “Like you don’t know.”

“Stiles?”

He smiles at Kelly, apologetically, takes a step toward her. She flinches away. He stops. 

“Sorry, guys.”

Then he takes Peter’s hand in leads him away. 

+

Peter showers while Stiles packs his things, surprised as how much has accumulated over the months he was here. He unpacks, packs his essentials. Leaves the rest. 

Changes his clothes and loads the dishwasher one last time. Waters the cactus. 

“Why did you leave?” Peter asks from the bathroom doorway, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, a towel around his neck. His feet are bare and his eyes are red. 

Stiles shrugs. The fox snickers. “I was broken,” he finally offers, because he’s had years to come to terms with it. “I was broken and it was only getting worse.”

“And now?”

He shrugs again. He doesn’t know. He stayed here and it was good and now he’s leaving again and that’s okay, too. The drifting, the road, the wandering, it’s in his blood now. 

(Keep going.)

He knows, without thinking about it, that the only place he could ever settle down now is Beacon Hills and he knows, just as easily, that he’s never going back there. 

He looks at Peter. Peter looks steadily back. 

He should be afraid. Worried. Surprised. Angry that Peter brought all that drama back into his life. 

But. 

He picks up one bag, tosses it at Peter, grabs the other. He locks the door after them, leaves the key in Kelly and Brooke’s mailbox. He can’t sense them inside. Maybe they went back to Brooke’s parents. Maybe they called the cops. 

He climbs into the car. Peter follows.

Stiles leaves, a dead body half a mile down the road and Peter riding shotgun like he’s always been there. Like he belongs there. Their hands meet over the gearstick and it’s warm and comfortable, old and familiar and so, so long coming. 

+

“Why?” Stiles asks, again, finally, somewhere in-between.

Peter, reclining on a dirty motel bed like it’s a throne, shrugs. “Why did you leave, sweetheart?” Again, finally, somewhere in-between.

Stiles suspects that he has unlearned how to hold on to things.

“Are you staying?”

_With me?_

Another shrug as Peter sits up, reels him in by his wrist, buries his face in Stiles’ chest and starts gnawing at the edge of his ribcage, indelicate and sure to leave marks. “Are you?”

Stiles leaves.

It’s not even hard. 

He just leaves and keeps leaving (keeps going), has for years and years and he doesn’t think he knows how to stop, now. He’s not the goddamn tree that killed him and he does better without roots. 

But Peter – Peter.

“Will you come after me, if I do?”

Peter hums into his skin, warm and familiar, and turns red eyes upwards to meet Stiles. “Yes.”

+


End file.
